Slow Food can have multiple meanings

When I first stumbled across the phrase Slow Food I had a new baby. Feeding myself, I was feeding her. And I wanted to know everything I could about what we ate. For the first time I took a good long look at what I put on our plates. To be honest, at first, I didn’t quite get the meaning of the phrase. I didn’t immediately grasp that it represented a differing approach to the fast, industrialized food we so often consume without any thought. Instead, my interpretation was more literal. I assumed Slow Food meant lingering over a meal. Chewing with mindfulness. Contemplating the origin of the piece of fruit in your hand. Appreciating the gardening skills, not to mention the miraculous growing process, necessary to harvest the food you brought to your table. Now, 25 years after the phrase was first coined, I know what it really means. I understand and agree with the principle of buying local and knowing the origin of what you consume and what you feed your family. But I still hold onto my definition. To me, slow food is taking a tomato out of the brown paper bag brought to the office by a coworker. A bag filled with red, ripe incredibly delicious tomatoes grown in her back yard. Perhaps even grown with heirloom seeds. It is a basket of squash selected one at a time from a local or regional grower’s stand at the farmer’s market. It is food grown purposefully, picked carefully and chosen thoughtfully. But my expanded idea of slow food is sitting down to a meal with no television or radio in the background. No reading at the table. Celebrating one bite at a time food - true slow food - that deserves to be savored and consumed with appreciation. After all, whenever possible, food, like love, should only be slow. Planted, cultivated, nurtured and harvested in its own good time. Given plenty of light and watered deeply. Picked and shared with gratitude and generosity.